And so, today, RIM announced its Hail Mary - a brand new mobile operating system (well, sort-of new), as well as two new devices. In addition, the Canadian company also officially changed its name from Research In Motion to Blackberry. The firstfewreviews of Blackberry 10 are already out, and it's not bad. The problem, however, is that in the case of Blackberry, 'not bad' could easily mean 'not good enough'.

"The first few reviews of Blackberry 10" are already saying that the "server-class operating systems shoved into a mobile device" is doing better than the embedded and focused QNX when it comes to battery life.

Yeah, they messed up something above QNX - letting apps do what they want.

Because, you know, the real power usage happens in apps, not in the OS, and that is the very reason why all mobile OSes restrict or cull running apps. This is not dumbing down multitasking; why would Android's multitasking be not "real"?

Surprise, battery life is a precious resource in mobile environments, just like CPU usage and GPU horsepower is.

Letting every app have free reign over the system is a recipe for disaster and leads to increased costs. Notice BB10 devices ship with 2GB of RAM, necessitated by the fact that more apps are resident in memory at a time.

Multitasking on mobile has been a "solved thing" for a while now, I'm not sure why BlackBerry chose to allow unrestricted multitasking on their OS.

We've come to a point where this "freedom" is more of a handicap when end users start to see significant battery life issues because of it.

Notice BB10 devices ship with 2GB of RAM, necessitated by the fact that more apps are resident in memory at a time.

I know as WP fanboy you will be unaware of that but outside of WP there are platforms indeed doing clever memory management like freezing apps that are invisible in the background. You will also be shocked to read now that there is no difference in battery usage if you have empty RAM or RAM filled with data.

We've come to a point where this "freedom" is more of a handicap

Brave fanboy even taking over the most stupid argument that freedom is a handicap.